Who are you, Doc?
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: "I was born on a planet called Gallifrey, in the constellation of Kasterbrous. I am a Time Lord. I stole this TARDIS and I've been travelling ever since." What if the Doctor had given a longer account into her past? Spoilers for Spyfall.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer - As always I don't own Doctor Who.

I hope more Time Lords appear in the series, even if Gallifrey's current future looks bleak. Padrac was a renegade Time Lord councillor who tried to destroy the universe in Big Finish's Doom Coalition collection. Parrak was the tomb world of the Time Lord who had discovered regeneration, which the Master wanted to use to heal him.

Please let me know what you think.

* * *

Who are you, Doc?"

"You okay?"

The Doctor stilled as Yaz's question penetrated her consciousness.

"You're really quiet," Yaz went on with her observations.

_That's an understatement, _the Doctor thought to herself as she distracted herself by checking over the controls. She needed to distract herself, anything to get the hideous sight of the Capitol of Gallifrey ravaged and destroyed, the mighty glass dome which had enclosed the Time Lords inside a dimensionally transcendental domain which had contained the technology her people had developed to monitor and manipulate the Web of Time, housing the Eye of Harmony, the Population III star which had been wrenched from its orbit by a time scoop and frozen in time on the moment of its collapse into a black hole to harness the energy of a collapse which never took place.

Centuries, millions upon millions of aeons of history…gone. Destroyed by fire, and Omega knew what else.

Destroyed by the Master.

The Doctor wasn't surprised the Master would do something like that. Her fourth incarnation's encounter with the Master when he had worked with Goth to assassinate the Lord President in his first attempt to jump-start a new regeneration cycle before that business on Parrak where three of the Master's incarnations had dealt with the Eleven to wrestle the Matrix print of Artron to get the regeneration cycle, and that mess where the Master had destroyed a chunk of the universe after he'd taken Tremas' body - she still hated herself for never finding a way to help Nyssa's father; he deserved better than that - when the Master had foolishly stopped Logopolis because he had no idea what it was, had proven the Master was not above destruction on large scales.

But seeing Gallifrey in that state... What in the name of Rassilon and Omega had Rassilon and Omega, and the other Founding Fathers do to warrant _that?!_

"Yeah," Ryan agreed. "You have been for days."

The Doctor sighed mentally. It hadn't been her intention to be silent, not in the least. Her current incarnation was geared for socialisation much like her tenth and eleventh lives, but her hearts hadn't been in it. She had been so stunned by the return of the Master and what she'd seen him do to their people.

_The Timeless Child. _

Just….thinking about that was enough to make the Doctor lash out. The worst part was it was instinctual, like some part of her programmed to never even think of it, and when it came out or was mentioned, she was to lash out angrily in defence. When those cloth-things on Desolation during that race where she and her friends had joined Epzo and Angstrom to find the TARDIS after it had drifted off course after her last regeneration had read her mind…she had lashed out at them instinctually, telling them to keep out of her mind.

But the worst part of it was she had no idea what kind of new dirty secret her people had been hiding for so long. That hologram of the Master had made it clear whatever it was it was a big secret, one so terrible it had caused the Master to be disillusioned with the rest of the Time Lords.

The Doctor knew the Master well enough to know this was a big secret; while all of the Master's incarnations varied on their manner, she knew he was neither lying nor exaggerating. She had seen it in his expression.

A look of hollow grief.

The Master was shaken by the experience, and she knew despite how he loved killing, what he had discovered and what he'd done to the other Time Lords must have been horrific.

Ever since she had learnt about the Death Zone and what had happened to Omega, she had started to give up hope of discovering a secret of her people that she would actually like.

So far the worst secrets she'd encountered had taken place when she had been in her eighth and wartime incarnations when she had discovered Padrac's scheme to destroy the universe, and Rassilons' desire to initiate the Ultimate Sanction for that insane scheme to elevate the Time Lords to a new realm of consciousness.

But something told her this was going to be one secret which would truly shake her belief system up.

It had been enough to shake up _the Master; _she had never seen anything like that expression in her old friend's eyes, in any lifetime, never. In some of his lifetimes, he had merely killed simply because he had no choice, whereas in others he was blatantly sadistic and cruel without thought. What he had done to Gallifrey had shaken him, he didn't regret it, she knew him better than to hope for that especially since she had learnt her mistakes following the mess with Missy. But he was shaken and horrified by what he'd found. And now she dreaded finding it out herself since she knew no matter what she did, she knew somehow she would discover the truth.

Part of her was tempted to return to Gallifrey to try to discover the truth to just get it over and done with, or at least discover a legend that pointed a clue; even though the planet and the city were in ruins, there would be more than enough there for her to discover.

No. She decided against it.

Even if she did make the return to Gallifrey, she was afraid of looking at all the corpses of the Time Lords and the scores of innocents the Master had murdered. On top of that in a practical perspective, the Doctor knew if the Founding Fathers of her people had hidden the legend, then it wouldn't be lying in wait, although she wondered why it was implanted in the back of the minds of the Time Lords, including the Master and herself like the race memory of humanity which described their loathing and fear of the Silurians.

No, she decided to give it a miss for now. She would look for clues in the normal universe, and if she needed to return to Gallifrey then she would. She just hoped she could stomach it after seeing the Citadel in ruins.

"They're right. Five planets, you've barely said a word," Graham said.

The Doctor looked up in exasperation. "I'm fine!" she stressed while she moved around the console, trying hard to shake off the Master's holographic message stating everything they had known and had thought they had known for centuries as Time Lords, was nothing more than a lie since she had no idea what it would do to her when she found out.

"Why don't you ever share anything with us?" Graham's question broke through her thoughts.

The Doctor raised her head and saw her friends, her fam, looking at her pointedly before she went around the console and was hidden by the central column. She wasn't surprised by their curiosity, really; after the encounter with the Master and how so many other things had been said about her, they were bound to be curious. That fiasco in MI6 when C had stated pompously she was a man always would have raised a few eyebrows, and while she had been making that ice-tea in the TARDIS while the Master and Graham were chatting when they had believed him to their friend and ally, she had listened in on the conversation.

She knew they had been talking about her previous selves, all of whom were male. It wasn't surprising, really; in her previous regeneration cycle, she had been a stick in the mud type who had the same gender throughout every incarnation, despite the variety available. In truth, she had always been nervous of changing gender because it would change what worked for her previous selves.

It was foolish, really since Time Lords like Ophiuchus, the Corsair, and even Drax had changed gender once or twice in their regenerations without trouble. It wasn't until her new regeneration cycle she had begun to entertain the possibility since the opportunity had almost been lost when her tenth self had vanity issues.

Now she was a woman she had no idea why she didn't bother with it a long time ago.

"I share stuff!" she cried in exasperation, jumping from behind the time rotor and throwing her hands up before ducking around again; a part of her was annoyed she was behaving so childishly, but she had her mind on other things that she truly did not like the implications of.

"Not about yourself, though," Graham said.

"Yeah, you know everything about us," Ryan added while she was walking around the console to distract herself even more, although every step she took only took them closer and closer to them.

"And we know nothing about you," Yaz pointed out.

"Mm," Graham agreed before she came full circle around the console.

The Doctor sighed. This reminded her of the days when Rose and Martha had walked into her ninth and tenth lives, although her reluctance in both instances was because she didn't want to send her mind back to the Time War. In her current self's case, it was because she had been having trouble once she had remembered, finally, what had happened with Clara during that confrontation with Rassilon on Gallifrey accepting her Time Lord heritage since she had been disgusted with the lengths of what her people were willing to take to find out what the obscure legend of the Hybrid meant.

The Doctor was about to say "Fine" to her friends, and give them a few facts, but she checked herself.

She calmly turned and faced them and walked over to the steps leading to the console and she sat down and looked up.

"What do you want to know?" she asked. "I'll answer some of your questions now."

Graham looked between Yaz and Ryan before she looked down at her. Feeling a bit silly, he sat down. The others followed his lead.

"Who are you, Doc?" Graham asked, looking earnestly at her. "Really?"

"My real name is unpronounceable to humans, and you wouldn't be able to understand it," the Doctor smiled. "There's a tradition on my world where we choose our names, or in cases like myself, the Master, and the Corsair, remember her? Titles."

"The Corsair?" Yaz repeated. "You mean the three of you have names, but you chose titles?"

The Doctor nodded. "Sometimes a title is simpler than a name."

"Where are you from?" Ryan asked.

The Doctor's smile faded a little bit, the image of the citadel on fire entering her thoughts again. "I was born on a planet called Gallifrey, in the constellation of Kasterbrous. I am a Time Lord," she added, worried about the future of her people; she had no idea if the Master had been so angry he had only slaughtered a large number of Gallifreyans and left behind a few survivors here and there by mistake, although she hoped so since she had lost the Time Lords once and although she was angry with them for what had happened with Clara, she didn't like the thought of them being gone again. "My people have a history spanning a billion years or so, although there are legends stating our people existed even longer."

"A billion years?" Graham gasped.

The Doctor nodded. "My people have had power over time travel for over ten million years. We achieved mastery over time and space when two of our greatest scientists," she inwardly bit her lip, hoping that Rassilon hadn't used a lie to build the foundations of Time Lord culture although the Master had seemed genuine, "snatched a star about to become a black hole, and froze it in time while they used it to create the closed-off wormhole which would become the Time Vortex which we travel through. After that, my people started to police time travel since they were afraid history would be jeopardised."

_Was the Master right? Was it all a lie?_

"Wow!" Yaz whispered, amazed. "I always thought your people had developed time travel like some of the races we've seen have space travel."

"No," the Doctor shook her head, not offended by the misconception in the least. "My people were the first race to develop and master time travel, and we made it possible for others to time travel as well since other methods are too dangerous or are inherently risky. Any other questions about me?" she asked, not in the mood to get into a debate about the different forms of time travel out there.

The next question was predictable. "That Master bloke," Ryan began, "you know each other, and yet you didn't recognise him. Why not?"

The Doctor had been wondering when a question related to regeneration would turn up since there were so many flags for her friends to pick out, and she bit her lip against giving the standard response. After a few moments of thought, she began. "Do you remember when we met, and I said half an hour before we'd met I was a white-haired Scotsman, and later on I told you and Grace about regeneration?" she said, looking between the three members of her fam.

"Yeah," Yaz replied. "We thought you were having us on."

"Well, I wasn't. We Time Lords can regenerate our bodies when we're subjected to trauma. There is a burst of energy, and it changes us on a molecular level so it rebuilds our bodies. All organs are changed, our bone structures are, well, restructured. We can change our height, our weight, and our appearance. Sometimes even our gender," the Doctor explained, "but if you're hoping on a more in-depth explanation, don't because there are so aspects to regeneration even my people don't understand. As for why I didn't recognise the Master, I don't know; technically we're meant to recognise each other telepathically, but there are ways around that, and it's not unusual for the Master to use those methods since he's done it before."

"When we met C in MI6, he said you were always a man, and when we were in the outback before the Master showed his true colours, he said the same thing," Graham said. "Is it true you were a bloke?"

"Oh yes," the Doctor stood up and walked to the console and she went to the scanner and after a few seconds, she looked back at her friends with an enigmatic smile. "Do you want to see 'em?" she grinned.

"Who?"

"My former selves." Without waiting for an answer, the Doctor flipped a switch and the lighting of the console room died down while holographic shapes appeared in the room. They solidified into the shape of people. Twelve of them.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer - I don't own Doctor Who.

To everyone who've enjoyed this story, thank you. To the reviewer who asked if River was going to turn up, I am afraid you're going to be disappointed since she won't be turning up in this story.

Enjoy!

* * *

Who are you Doc, Really?

Graham gaped. He hadn't known what they'd find if they asked the Doctor for more details about herself, but this wasn't what he or the others had had in mind. In truth, they had expected the Doctor to just refuse to talk to them, but they guessed that the Time Lord - _Time Lord - _would be reticent and mysterious as always, and she would just refuse to speak to them about her past.

The influx of information from someone who appeared to have had _twelve _appearances in her life…

"Oooh, I miscounted. Sorry," the Doctor said sheepishly, hitting a few more buttons on the console, and a thirteenth hologram appeared in the air although there were no details of what the Doctor's previous appearances looked like yet.

"Thirteen?" Yaz whispered after she counted them for the third time before turning to the Doctor. "You've had _thirteen…," _she paused as she struggled to think of a term to describe what they were seeing.

"Incarnations," the Doctor filled her in solemnly looking at the holographic shapes of people she had once been which were beginning to form in the console room. "Lifetimes. Lives. Lifespan. Here they come."

Yaz, Ryan and Graham looked expectantly at the holograms. The Doctor stepped over to stand near her fam, looking at the holograms as they began taking on the shapes the Doctor had programmed into them.

The first holographic picture of the Doctor was an old-looking man with silvery-white hair and a hawklike expression which put Yaz in mind of _the Demon Headmaster_ played by Terrance Hardiman, although this man's expression had a slightly warmer and kinder cast. He was wearing vaguely Victorian-era clothes, with a black frock coat and check trousers.

"That was you once, Doc?" Graham turned to the Time Lady, wondering how the youthful woman near him could have looked so ancient.

The Doctor chuckled and looked at him with her trademark smile. "If you had called _him _'Doc', he would have said _Don't call me Doc!" _to the amazement of her fam, her voice changed to a voice Graham instantly likened to a Sergeant Major's _"Stand up and pay attention to me, you 'orrible little man" _voice rather than her usual accent. "And yes, that was me. In fact, that was my first incarnation. Don't let my physical age back then fool you; by Time Lord standards, I was young. Impossibly young. Oh, to be young again.…"

"Your first?" Ryan whispered while another holographic form of the Doctor appeared.

The second hologram was a short man dressed in clothing a few sizes too big for him which made him look clownish, but the dark haircut which reminded them of a stereotypical Beatles cut which only made him appear more clownish.

"What about him?"

"My second incarnation," the Doctor replied, a smile on her lips which reminded Yaz of the times her grandmother had told her and her sister of her life in India. "I programmed the TARDIS to show my previous regenerations in sequence."

"Just…how many times can you do this…regeneration thing, then?" Ryan asked.

The Doctor sighed. "Time Lords should regenerate twelve times, giving only thirteen lives."

"What? But there are thirteen holograms," Graham pointed out, although he was left wondering if he'd miscounted.

"In one of my later lives I made the mistake of wasting a regeneration as it was coming, and I used the energy to heal myself rather than use it to fully regenerate my body," the Doctor shook her head as she remembered that moment back in her tenth incarnation while the hologram of her third incarnation was appearing, remembering how comfortable it had been in the same body despite the constant loneliness although the desire to not regenerate was part of the reason. "I was down a regeneration as a result, so my next incarnation was forced to age slowly over a period of two thousand years while under constant attack. In short, the Time Lords gave me a new regeneration cycle. My current body is the second incarnation of my second regeneration cycle. I'll tell you what happened in a moment. Here comes my third self."

Graham turned and he saw a tall man dressed in a velvet suit with a frilled shirt which put him in mind of Austin Powers, although the man with a furrowed face with greying hair and the debonair demeanour of a gentleman rather than a walking joke.

The next man who appeared was as tall as the man in velvet, only he had a mass of brown curls dressed in loose comfortable clothes which looked bohemian in style while an immensely long scarf was looped around his throat.

"I'm sure I've seen that scarf in the TARDIS wardrobe," Yaz commented.

"You likely have," the Doctor commented. "After I regenerate, I always change my clothes. Most of them are still in the wardrobe somewhere."

After the Fourth Doctor, another Doctor took his place. This Doctor was a decade or so younger physically than the Fourth Doctor, with fair hair, dressed in a beige, red-lined coat and striped trousers. The Sixth Doctor was a large man in terms of both height and weight, with long curly blond hair. His outfit was incredibly flamboyant it was like being in a shop which sold paint had recently experienced an explosion which had blown up the tins. This Doctor was wearing a patchwork coat made of a diversity of fabrics in both colour and texture which had been stuck together at random. His waistcoat was just as vivid while the yellow and black striped trousers and the green boots seemed to be the only normal things about this Doctor's appearance.

Yaz clapped a hand to her mouth. "Oh my god! If my sister were here, she would vomit everywhere at the sight of that coat."

The Doctor rolled her eyes. "On some worlds, Yasmin Khan, that coat would have been the height of fashion, but I take your point."

Ryan chuckled and shook his head just as the seventh hologram came into view, showing a much shorter man in contrast to his predecessor who was wearing a broken suit with a red waistcoat and a straw hat.

The next hologram showed a Doctor who, Yaz privately considered, the most best looking one yet with long brown hair and gave off the appearance of a Byron-esque hero dressed in a green velvet coat, cream-coloured trousers and silvery waistcoat.

The next Doctor that appeared was a major contrast to his predecessors. This Doctor was much older in appearance with a weathered face with a sloppily trimmed beard and slicked greying hair which gave him the impression that he had been forced to tidy himself up a bit in a hurry. He was dressed in a battered brown leather jacket and dark trousers and boots that looked as though they would fall apart at any minute and yet hadn't had the time. The most conspicuous thing about the man was the bombardier belt slung over his shoulder...

The current Doctor sighed. "A few lives ago, I wouldn't have admitted that one's presence."

Ryan turned to her. "Why? He's you."

"I'll tell you in a moment, Ryan," the Doctor said, her grim and solemn demeanour making it clear she wished she hadn't brought the matter up. Yaz exchanged a look with Ryan and Graham; they were as confused as she was, and they wondered what the Doctor had done in that particular life which their current Doctor didn't want to discuss.

But any further questions were put on hold for a moment, the next hologram was becoming clearly defined until it showed a tall man continuing the previous Doctor's look with the leather jacket with short dark hair with a brooding expression on his face with two big ears.

Ryan chuckled. "God, look at those ears. They're like satellite dishes."

The Doctor glared at him. "Er, excuse me, Ryan. But don't diss the ears."

Ryan quickly held up his hands, and Yaz giggled before the next Doctor appeared. She had thought the Byron-esque Doctor had been the most best looking of the lot, but this man certainly had something attractive going on. This Doctor was a tall, thin man with spiky brown hair with sideburns, wearing a pin-striped suit beneath a long brown coat.

The Doctor nodded her head at him. "That's the one who wasted a regeneration. Vanity issues," she scoffed.

_No wonder, _Yaz thought to herself, and then the next Doctor appeared. This one was much younger physically than the rest although Yaz had no idea how Time Lords measured the age of their lifetimes, with a pronounced chin and floppy hair wearing a tweed jacket over a blue shirt with a matching bowtie and dark trousers.

Graham turned to the Doctor. "Quite a few of you like bowties, right Doc?"

The Doctor chuckled as she looked fondly at the young-looking hologram. "Ah, well, that's 'cause they're so easy to carry off. And besides, as he would say, bowties are cool."

"You actually said that?"

The Doctor nodded just as the final hologram became clear. This one was a tall, white-haired man with pronounced eyebrows and a weathered face which was both kindly and stern at the same time, wearing clothes Yaz and the others remembered clearly.

"Hold on, you were wearing those clothes when we met," Graham recalled, remembering how he'd wondered why such a short woman would walk around wearing clothes too big for her.

"Regeneration. Every time the body changes, it doesn't resize the clothes to fit," the Doctor replied, but she nodded at the final Doctor.

"Hold on," Ryan rubbed his forehead as he remembered something else about that strange encounter with the Doctor which had changed their lives forever. "When you were on grans' sofa, your hands were glowing."

The Doctor nodded, not surprised. "Residual regeneration energy," she explained. "My body would have been fizzing with it afterwards. I let off a lot of energy when I regenerated into my current life, but that happens every time I regenerate. That's why the TARDIS drifted all the way to Desolation."

"You mean you fell out of the TARDIS because you'd.. regenerated?" Yaz asked, testing the name of the process on her tongue. "How? I mean, if something happens to you while we're with you, should we expect that?"

The Doctor shook her head. "No. The only reason I lost the TARDIS was because when I was in my last body, I was just tired and frustrated with constantly regenerating so frequently. I delayed the regeneration for as long as I could before I realised there was no point in delaying it. So I went through with it."

The Doctor walked to the console and she shut off the holograms.

"So come on, then. Why did you say that about the ninth you?" Yaz demanded, deciding to get down to business.

If there was one thing the Doctor hated it was being reminded of the Time War, both her eighth incarnations valiant attempts to avoid it and her wartime incarnation's actions.

Looking back with her more older and wiser perspective now she recalled the events of the last days of the war, how she had saved Gallifrey rather than burn it after learning what Rassilon had been planning to do.

She…didn't like thinking about those times. After that mess in the Tantalus Eye where her people had been willing to wipe out millions of humans whose only crime was to be there, just to destroy the Daleks who were plotting Gallifrey's destruction with the dematerialisation weapon they'd come up which was powered by the time winds from the local anomaly, she had been disgusted and furious; Karlax might have pulled the trigger which ended Cinder's life, but the simpering little bastard was an example of the type of Time Lord whom the Doctor loathed, but that was nothing compared to the mad scheme Rassilon had come up with to end the Time War.

She had just become disgusted with her entire species, tired of their self-important attitudes, the way they looked down on the other races of the universe and how they had decided just to destroy the universe to save themselves. The rage she had been experiencing since Cinder's death was practically stoked when she heard Rassilon had planned to end it all.

Ordinarily the Doctor wouldn't talk about the war or anything she had done during those days. But since she had revealed so much to her fam, things she had never revealed before since she had never shown off her previous regenerations, she decided to get this off of her chest.

"It was because of the Time War," she leaned against the controls and hugged herself as if keeping the chill of the memories from freezing her.

Her fam looked at each other, and she knew she had stunned them since they hadn't expected war to come into the topic.

"The what?" Graham asked.

"The Time War," the Doctor repeated. "The Last Great Time War. The most devastating war in the universe's history. A war between the Time Lords…and the Daleks."

"The Daleks?" Ryan echoed. "Is that why you hate them, because you fought in a war with them?"

The Doctor scoffed. "My hatred for the Daleks goes back longer than you think. I'd met the Daleks frequently in my earlier travels, seeing them tear galaxies apart, enslaving whole races, destroying races….but the Time War was when I had to face them in a way I'd never expected. The Last Great Time War was the worst conflict recorded in the universe's history. It raged through time and space, destroying whole races although in some cases they were brought back to life, only to be destroyed in turn again and again."

Graham and the others looked at each other in horror as they pictured that happening over and over again while two almighty enemies fought each other.

"And you fought in this war?" Yaz whispered, trying to imagine the Doctor fighting in something like this, only to find it hard to believe since although the Doctor was great with small crises she found it hard to picture her being involved with a war.

The Doctor bit her lip. Ordinarily she wouldn't have said a word about the topic beyond the basics, but with the revelations of who and what she was and some of her history, she felt she needed to explain what had happened. In any case, thanks to her eleventh and tenth selves partnering up with her war incarnation, a huge weight had been taken off of her soul.

"Reluctantly. The Time War took place in my eighth incarnation, but I refused to take part. Unfortunately I was pulled into the fighting a few times, but I tried staying out of it," the Doctor looked down at her hands grimly as she reflected on those dark days towards the end of her eighth incarnation where she witnessed the entire universe going mad with war. "I wanted no part of it. But even then I knew it was a lost cause. In the end, after avoiding it for as long as I could, I tried to save a young woman from a crashing ship. Once she realised I was a Time Lord, she resolved to die with her ship. Her last words will haunt me to my grave."

"What did she say?" Graham asked quietly.

"She said I was no better than the Daleks, and that some of the universe was still standing," the Doctor looked into her friend's eyes with eyes that looked so ancient they looked so strange in the face of a woman who was so young. "I refused to get off the ship, so it crashed. I apparently died, but the Sisterhood of Karn brought me back to life, telling me to fight. They showed me the crew member's body to make their point, and they gave me a potion to induce a regeneration into a warrior.

"The man with the bandolier," Graham said.

The Doctor nodded. "I won many victories for the Time Lords, but it didn't take long for me to feel more contempt for the High Council. I knew they'd been corrupt for a long time, but some of their decisions were insane, even by their standards. As the years passed - I don't know how long the war lasted, so don't ask, although my estimate is it lasted for about….six hundred years - I became resigned to the war."

The Doctor sighed. "And then I lost Cinder."

"Who?" Yaz asked.

"Cinder. She was a human colonist on a world near a temporal anomaly. The Daleks had conquered her world, and she'd joined a resistance movement. When I arrived she wanted to leave, but after an investigation we found the Daleks were planning on destroying Gallifrey, wiping us out of history altogether. We took the news to the High Council, and they decided to use a weapon which would have destroyed all life in that part of the galaxy as a result," the Doctor clenched her fists angrily as she remembered that meeting and how dismissive the Time Lords were and how she and Cinder were treated.

Cinder had had it worse, especially since the Castellan and Karlax had raped her mind.

"What?" Ryan gaped. "They would have killed all of those people just to save themselves?"

"Yes," the Doctor replied, not even bothering to defend the Time Lords.

She knew she had done worse in her seventh incarnation but after the mess she had made of things in that life - how she had pushed Ace, Benny, and Hex with her schemes, it wasn't until after that business with the Eleven was sorted out and she'd gone to Skaro to retrieve the Master's remains, the Doctor had decided to drop the manipulations.

"Your people would have _murdered _hundreds of people just to win a battle?" Yaz asked, hissing the word angrily.

"Yes. You see, after millions of years in power, the Time Lords believed they were entitled," the Doctor explained, "but they weren't stupid; they had the sense to lock Cinder and me up. We managed to escape and we managed to come up with a different plan at the last minute. Unfortunately, a Time Lord called Karlax, who had just regenerated after the TARDIS he was in was destroyed, was exposed to the vacuum of space although I'm not sure if he'd suffered other injuries prior to that. But anyway, after he regenerated he tried to leave in my TARDIS, unaware I'd already preprogrammed the ship to come and save me and Cinder, he shot Cinder."

"Oh no," Ryan said.

"What happened?" Yaz stuttered.

"I left Karlax to the Daleks," the Doctor said dismissively, showing her contempt for the other Time Lord. "But it was too late, Cinder was already dead. Once the Daleks were defeated, I took her back to her home and buried her. But while I was there I took a good long look at the Time War."

The Doctor looked down at her hands. "I was so tired of the War, guys. I was so frustrated and angry with what had happened to Cinder, angry with how dismissive and self-entitled my people had become. I decided to end the war, but as I made my return I learnt Rassilon, the old leader of the Time Lords who'd been brought back to lead us, had decided to destroy the entire universe to end the war as part of an insane plan to end it all."

"WHAT?!" Ryan, Yaz and Graham shouted at once.

"Your people….would have destroyed everyone, just to end a war?"

"The Time Lords were already corrupt, but war changes people. The Time Lords had survived wars in the past, some of them were Time Wars, but the Daleks were nothing like their enemies of old," the Doctor explained. "As the war went on, the Time Lord got worse and worse. In the end, I was forced to choose the lesser of two evils; the Daleks or the destruction of the universe."

She sighed. "I chose to end the war by ending my own race."


	3. Chapter 3

Who are you Doc?

Silence.

Graham, Yaz and Ryan were stunned by what the Doctor had just told them about the Time War, and what she had done to her own people. The three of them knew the Doctor wasn't always a saint, far from it; she was an incredibly intelligent alien - Time Lord - but she wasn't a god, and she made mistakes like everyone else, and they knew that only too well.

But to destroy her entire race….

All three of them knew better than to just judge the Doctor for what she'd done in this Time War, and from what she'd told them so far, the war must have been a nightmare, and while they didn't like hearing what the Time Lords themselves had tried to do in the war, how willing they were to destroy the universe they found it hard to believe the woman they travelled with had gone so far.

"I stole a Time Lord weapon which would do the job, and for centuries after the War, I thought I had wiped out my race; looking back, I know I made the choice out of anger, of exhaustion, but when I looked back I did so in shame over what I'd decided to do. It was so bad I hypocritically turned away from the me who'd pushed the button in the first place," the Doctor looked down at her hands as she remembered how she'd exorcised her wartime incarnation who'd left in the TARDIS from the gallery containing the Gallifrey Falls painting (she would not think about the predestination paradox there, although thinking about it gave her hope she could find some Time Lords who'd survived the Master's massacre) even though truthfully he had done what any doctor would have done if faced with a life-threatening illness or injury to a patient.

The Doctor had come to that realisation her ninth, tenth, and eleventh selves were hypocrites for disowning their wartime incarnation's memory since they had gone on to do things which were just as morally reprehensible although on different scales. In any case, the Time Lords had been planning to destroy all life in the universe, so who was the monster?

She hoped never to have that question answered, ever.

"But….in that life, and I wouldn't find out until I was Mr Chinny, I had actually saved Gallifrey. I had stopped the Time War," the Doctor whispered.

"What?" Graham replied hopefully, hoping that his initial impression of the Doctor whom he had always found a bit mad and more than a little endearing hadn't been wrong. If it had, then he would leave.

"The weapon I took - the Moment - had the power to send my me in my wartime incarnation to my future even with the temporal ripple the universe had placed around the Time War itself so it wouldn't damage anything beyond. I met my tenth and eleventh incarnations, and with them, I came up with another plan which was better."

"What happened?" Ryan asked.

"There's a form of Time Lord art where we can take snapshots - it's not really like that, but just think of the outcome as snapshots - of time, freezing them in a single moment in time. Those moments can then be used to store moments in history forever, but what if with the right calculations and the right circumstances you could freeze an _entire planet _in a little pocket universe?" A slow smile had been spreading over the Doctor's face as she told them what her other selves had come up with when facing the Moment together.

"Get out, you can actually do that?" Ryan asked.

"Stasis cubes can freeze time, and every moment can be frozen. It doesn't matter about the scale, the tricky part of the whole thing were the calculations involved. When you're trying to freeze say a landscape, it doesn't need anything, but for something as large as a planet, complete with cities, people, and technology, you need to make calculations. It would take a Time Lord centuries to do, but fortunately, we can travel through time; when I came up with this plan with my other selves, we had the simple task of setting it all up by sending it back to my first incarnation as a child," the Doctor replied, smiling still. "All my previous selves came to push Gallifrey into the pocket universe, so they had a chance of survival."

The Doctor's smile faded a little bit as she remembered her last visits to the planet. "The timelines were not in sync with one another, so when I was in my wartime incarnation…I went off without remembering what I'd done," she looked down, remembering the emotional mess she had been in her ninth incarnation who had to deal with the pain of losing all of her people without knowing or remembering the truth.

"And you had to deal with that, all by yourself?" Yaz had tears in her eyes as she listened to the story. While she did question some of the Doctor's decisions, especially seeing how far she would be willing to go if she were pushed to a certain extent, she had to acknowledge to herself this story was more tragic than anything she'd heard so far, and she wondered how the Doctor had come out of it in the long term.

"No, I had friends. People who travelled with me in the TARDIS before you did," the Doctor replied, saying it hesitantly as she looked at her fam; while she wasn't as oblivious as her previous selves had been, she was still bemused by why her friends reacted so negatively to the notion there had been others in the TARDIS.

Graham shared a look with Yaz and Ryan, wondering why the Doctor was so nervous since they had already found signs of other people having been in the TARDIS before, although the matter had never really come up.

"They helped me through the worst of the trauma I'd gone through," the Doctor went on, deciding to move on before someone said anything else about her having other friends in the TARDIS - it had been frustrating when Rose and Martha had both gone into their jealousy tantrums about the whole idea, and the last thing she wanted was to have to speak about it now. "But the thing is they helped me, and when I finally remembered the end of the Time War, I had one problem."

"What was that?" Ryan asked, suddenly worried.

"I had to find my planet. Oh, don't worry, I did," she reassured them, although she was hoping they didn't ask for details since it hadn't been one of her better moments, dealing with Rassilon again and that mess with Me.

"Can we see Gallifrey sometime?" Yaz asked her with a hopeful smile.

The Doctor needed all of her self control to not shudder as the view of the ravaged and burnt-out Capitol came back to haunt her. "No, it's best not. Let's just say, the last time I met my people….things weren't as nice as we'd have wanted."

With that, the Doctor walked out of the console room and went deeper into the TARDIS before they could ask anything else.


End file.
